2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education,
and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs
would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be
evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It
is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones
of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks,
Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider,
for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become
a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and
distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological
and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic
challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately
addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious
and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as
practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together
people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with
representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business,
engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the
intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical
insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

I miss the jacket art (note to Amazon: color images of book jackets on K3), but the K2 has definitely gotten me reading again. Not that I stopped, but reading on K2 feels like reading used to--fresh, exciting, immediate.

I'm not sure where it's going, but I read two more books this week than I would have without my K2. And I read them voraciously.

Excerpt from a nice, concise interview in Newsweek on the economy with the man who predicted the current state of affairs, Nouriel Roubinin:

What is going to fuel the next growth cycle?That
is a difficult question. The periods of high growth in the United
States in the last 25 years have been characterized by an asset and
credit bubble. Whatever the future growth is going to be, this time
around it needs to be sustainable and not bubble-prone because we are
running out of bubbles to create. We had the real-estate [bubble], tech
bubble, housing bubble, hedge-fund bubble, private-equity bubble,
commodities bubble, even the art bubble—and they are all bursting.

What makes you different from the other economists?We
think usually that crowds—on average—can be wiser than individuals. In
this case, most people got it wrong because whenever we are in an
irrational, exuberant bubble, people fail to think correctly.

Do you believe this is a bear-market rally or do you think it is the market anticipating an economic recovery?As
we reach newer lows, we may be closer to a level of the market that is
fundamentally right. A year ago we were not as close to a true bottom.
Today we are closer to it. As we become closer to the bottom of the
economy, the stock market looks ahead and sees the light at the end of
the tunnel and rallies. In spite of these caveats, I would argue that
even the latest market rally is a bear-market rally.

Do you worry about China getting tired of holding our bonds?In
the short run, China has no option but to accumulate more reserves and
dollar reserves. Why? Because if they stop doing that, their currency
would appreciate sharply while their exports are plunging. So in the
short run, they are going to keep on accumulating. But I have seen a
huge number of new initiatives in the last month that suggest [the
Chinese] are pushing for the yuan to become an international currency
and a reserve currency. They are doing bilateral deals with countries
like Argentina and half a dozen others in yuan, not in dollars.

They are moving away from the dollar?Yes,
slowly they will. First they have to establish their own currency as an
international currency. That will take years, but already in a month
they have done more than in the last 10 years.

I love these vignettes of well known artists writing about their first experiences in New York.

Waking Up to New York

Mary BooneArrived: 1970

I remember that the first exhibition I was part of was by Chuck Close,
and that he sat in my office during the opening listening to the World
Series. That was at Klaus Kertess’s gallery, the Bykert gallery. Lynda
Benglis, who was my teacher at Hunter College, said, “Oh, if you need a
job, my boyfriend owns a gallery.” Because I thought I was gonna come
here and work at a museum, but I did that, and it really seemed so
lifeless.

Klaus
closed the gallery after ten years because it was getting to be too
successful! He said it was too much of a business. It’s so different
now. In the early days I remember Brice Marden had seven one-person
shows and never sold a painting. Even when I showed Julian Schnabel, it
took me two years to sell the first painting.

Julian
was the first artist to leave my gallery, and I was heartbroken. It was
like the spring of 1984, and I was sitting in my office, crying. In his
explanation at the time—you know, it’s like anything, probably things
change with the telling every time. But in those days, what he said was
that he wanted to be separated. He said, “How many artists do you have
in the Carnegie International?” And it was basically the whole gallery.
And he said, “Well, if I go to Pace, I’m the only artist from that
gallery in the Carnegie.” He wanted a kind of separateness from me, but
also from his generation. He wanted to be seen as an individual. We’re
still good friends; I think he’s a fantastic filmmaker. I also have a
different perception of this, because I think that life is about shared
experiences, and if you have an experience with an artist, you never
lose that. It’s like if you’re married and you have a child with
somebody, you’re never, ever really separated. And the child is the
art. So anyway, I was sitting in my office crying, and Jean-Michel
Basquiat comes in. And he was so sweet! He was so upset I was sitting
there crying. He put his arms around me and he said, “Mary, don’t
worry. I’m gonna be much more famous than Julian.” And then he walked
out, and he came back in with a huge watermelon, which he plunked on my
desk, and we ate.

Lauren Hutton, actressArrived: 1964

I came to New York for two things: to get to Africa and to find LSD. In
those days it was legal. You could get it from this Swiss chemical
company, and I met six guys who were very willing to give it to me. But
I didn’t like any of them enough to take it, so it took me a few
months. As for Africa, I was supposed to meet a friend in New York, and
we were going to take a tramp steamer to Tangier. It was going to cost
$140. Once I got there, my plan was to take a bus for ten cents to the
outskirts of town and see elephants and rhinoceroses and giraffes. I
was as ignorant as a telephone pole.

"The prevailing global system, then, today
faces an unwelcome choice. Either it trusts its native pragmatism in
the face of its enemy’s absolutism, or it falls back on metaphysical
values of its own-values that are looking increasingly tarnished and
implausible. Does the West need to go full-bloodedly metaphysical to
save itself? And if it does, can it do so without inflicting too much
damage on its liberal, secular values, thus ensuring there is still
something worth protecting from its illiberal opponents?

If Marxism once held out a promise of
reconciling culture and civilization, it is partly because its founder
was both a Romantic humanist and an heir of Enlightenment rationalism.
Marxism is about culture and civilization together-sensuous
particularity and universality, worker and citizen of the world, local
allegiances and international solidarity, the free self-realization of
flesh-and-blood individuals and a global cooperative commonwealth of
them. But Marxism has suffered in our time a staggering political
rebuff; and one of the places to which those radical impulses have
migrated is-of all things-theology. In theology nowadays, one can find
some of the most informed and animated discussions of Deleuze and
Badiou, Foucault and feminism, Marx and Heidegger. That is not entirely
surprising, since theology, however implausible many of its truth
claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an
increasingly specialized world-one whose subject is nothing less than
the nature and transcendental destiny of humanity itself. These are not
issues easily raised in analytic philosophy or political science.
Theology’s remoteness from pragmatic questions is an advantage in this
respect.

We find ourselves, then, in a most curious
situation. In a world in which theology is increasingly part of the
problem, it is also fostering the kind of critical reflection which
might contribute to some of the answers. There are lessons that the
secular Left can learn from religion, for all its atrocities and
absurdities; and the Left is not so flush with ideas that it can afford
to look such a gift horse in the mouth. But will either side listen to
the other at present? Will Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins read
this and experience an epiphany that puts the road to Damascus in the
shade? To use two theological terms by way of response: not a hope in
hell. Positions are too entrenched to permit such a dialogue. Mutual
understanding cannot happen just anywhere, as some liberals tend to
suppose. It requires its material conditions. And it seems unlikely
these will emerge as long as the so-called war on terror continues to
run its course.

The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins
and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal
humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can
only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be
free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a
generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision
of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is
possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of
humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned
post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth
saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag
with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin.
Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic
varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and
radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no
guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it
might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire
flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its
way."

Which is why, my friends, I ultimately believe more in Buddhism than liberal politics, but remain open to both.

I like this interview with Michael Pollan on the whether the Green Economy can save the planet.

Rumpus: I don’t want to ask you about an article
you haven’t read, but maybe the idea of “economy vs. environment” is
provocative enough to address.Owen argues, in so many
words, that economy has to be sacrificed to some extent to save the
environment. How do you feel about that?

Pollan: Well, I mean, that’s a good question. There
is a real effort to align economic growth with becoming green. It’s the
Thomas Friedman school of things, this idea that you can unleash these
powers that will drive certain change, that you can align economic
interests and the environment. It would be wonderful if it’s true. But
I think we need to make changes whether it’s true or not. The fact is
that there are fundamental tensions between the biological reality of
the planet right now and the economic reality. To some extent you can
adapt the economy, create a new set of rules and incentives to send it
down a better track, but finally people in the first world are going to
have to consume a whole lot less. Green stuff or black stuff, whatever
it is.

Rumpus: The idea of a “green economy” is really palatable, though.Pollan: I think it’s very politically comfortable to
suggest that you can have a non-zero-sum solution to both the global
economic crisis and our environmental problems, but my guess is that
the non-zero-sum solution is wishful thinking. We could have a greener
economy, even a greener consumer economy by changing the rules—whether
it’s by taxing carbon or trading carbon, I’m not sure what—but in the
end there’s just a fundamental problem with the sheer amount we’re
consuming. Fossil fuel is a very special thing. There is no other
fossil fuel out there. Yes, there’s solar energy, but whether it can
underwrite the kind of lifestyle we’ve had remains to be seen.So
if you’re a politician it’s very useful to say that we can have
economic growth and at the same time green the economy, but writers
just have to face up to the fact, whether it sells or not, that there
are some fundamental tensions between the economic order and the
biological order.

Rumpus: I was re-reading some passages from Botany of Desireand a particular sentence grabbed me.You
were talking about our Nature Narratives, and you said, “There’s the
old heroic story, where Man is at war with Nature; the romantic
version, where Man merges spiritually with Nature (usually with some
help from the pathetic fallacy); and, more recently, the environmental
morality tale, in which Nature pays man back for his transgressions,
usually in the coin of disaster.” If someone told you that our current
problems—the food crisis, the energy crisis, the health care
crisis—somehow epitomized the environmental morality tale, how would
you respond?

Pollan:
I think that’s the narrative in which a lot of things fit. Look at
industrial agriculture. You use too many antibiotics on your cattle to
get cheap meat, and suddenly you have antibiotic-resistant staph
infections popping up all over the Midwest. But that’s evolution.I mean, you could put a moral spin on it and say, oh, we got what we deserved.But
it’s just the feedback loop inherent to evolution. You spray too much
pesticide and a resistant bug emerges. Now if you have a moral cast of
mind, you’ll say, well, oh, boy, Nature is paying us back, getting even
with us for using all that pesticide. The situation certainly conforms
to the environmental morality narrative. But that doesn’t make the
narrative true.